Naked Capitalism has the article Why Did 51 American State Department Officials ‘Dissent’ Against Obama and Call for Bombing Syria?

This is an explanation of exactly what is so dangerous about a Clinton presidency. If you don’t read at least part of this article, then you will be missing one of the strongest reasons why I will never vote for Hillary Clinton. This is also the reason I was so disgusted with Obama when he chose her for Secretary of State. Thank goodness he was able to resist some of her calls to war, and what a shame it was that he could not resist others.

Even Donald Trump might not be as dangerous as Clinton, at least in Foreign Policy.  He has at least stated a propensity to keep us out of situations we have no business interfering in.

YouTube has the video of the HBO movie Hacking Democracy.

This is the story of Bev Harris and her organization Black Box Voting (http://www.blackboxvoting.org). She is a true American hero and a good example of what ALL Americans should be doing to ensure that our rights and liberties are protected against the elitist and special interest’s agenda!

I defy you to watch this movie and then tell me you are tired of hearing about the possibility of there being election fraud. Just from looking at the machine that sucks in my ballot here in Sturbridge, I would guess that we use the Diebold system. I have never attended the public sessions where the Town Clerk verifies that the machines are working. Before seeing this movie, I would not have known what questions to ask. Now I know that the issue is in the memory card that is put into the machine. If it is an honest memory card, then the machine will pass with flying colors. If the memory card has been tampered, there is nothing that the Town Clerk or the public would be able to do to detect the tampering, given the tools that Diebold provides.

The election monitoring system that I have outlined on my blog “Uncounted: The New Math of American Elections (Full Length)” could detect this kind of fraud.

My vote checking system does not depend on access to the secret Diebold software. It does not depend on access to the memory cards. My system would be relatively easy to implement using existing computer technology and software. What is the chance that something like what I have described, a system that is not patented, nor is it copyrighted, nor is it claimed to be trade secret, will ever see the light of day?

There should be a law that only open source software may be used in the election process. It should be illegal to use trade secret software to process ballots. That alone, without even going into the details of specifying the levels of required security, would make a huge difference.

YouTube has the video Uncounted: The New Math of American Elections (Full Length).

UNCOUNTED is an explosive new documentary that shows how the election fraud that changed the outcome of the 2004 election led to even greater fraud in 2006 – and now looms as an unbridled threat to the outcome of the 2008 election. This controversial feature length film by Emmy award-winning director David Earnhardt examines in factual, logical, and yet startling terms how easy it is to change election outcomes and undermine election integrity across the U.S. Noted computer programmers, statisticians, journalists, and experienced election officials provide the irrefutable proof.

This is an issue far more serious than Citizens United.  Without knowing about this video, I wrote a blog post in 2012 touching on this issue that is addressed at 46:16 in the above video.  The previous post was Making Electronic Voting Transparent.  My post covers an important ingredient left out by Athan Gibbs’ invention that is mentioned in the previous video starting at 46:16.  Athan Gibbs’ appearance in the video demonstrates the hardware that would be all that was needed to implement what I described.

My contribution to Athan Gibbs’ idea is to make the results verifiable online by any person who cares to check his or her vote and to check the vote totals.  I didn’t mention in my previous blog post, that the entire election result database should be made easily available, so that people can verify the published vote count.  Individuals can verify the correctness of their own vote.  The combination of verifying the vote totals and verifying individual votes would make it nearly impossible to commit fraud at any point in the system and have it go undetected.

It was a Facebook comment that led me to this video. Thanks to Ellen Cook Crowfoot for posting this.

YouTube (ironically) has the video Google Will Steal This Election & How – Dr. Robert Epstein Interview [ep 7].

In this episode of Redacted Tonight VIP, Lee gets Dr. Robert Epstein! Lee asks him about the state of the current election, the impact of the internet on modern politics,

I was led to this video by a link in the RT article Google involved with Clinton campaign, controls information flow – Assange.

In a Facebook post, I had observed the following:

I hadn’t thought about this before. I did notice on Google News that no matter what was happening, Trump and then Clinton appeared on the front page. Never Bernie. I would have to type Bernie in the search box to find any stories about him.

This 2008 article in The New York Times, Obamanonics, is both prescient and perhaps unknowingly unmasks all that is wrong with it.

Among the policy experts and economists who make up the Democratic government-in-waiting, there is now something of a consensus. They agree that deficit reduction did an enormous amount of good. It helped usher in the 1990s boom and the only period of strong, broad-based income growth in a generation. But that boom also depended on a technology bubble and historically low oil prices. In the current decade, the economy has continued to grow at a decent pace, yet most families have seen little benefit. Instead, the benefits have flowed mostly to a small slice of workers at the very top of the income distribution. As Rubin told me, comparing the current moment with 1993, “The distributional issues are obviously more serious now.” From today’s vantage point, inequality looks likes a bigger problem than economic growth; fiscal discipline seems necessary but not sufficient.

No, the boom didn’t “also depended on a technology bubble and historically low oil prices”.  These factors were the main cause of the boom. The deficit reduction did not usher in the 1990s boom.  The deficit reduction tempered the boom by taking money out of the private sector to lower the government debt.  When the bubble finally burst, it was the continued deficit reduction that held the economy back.  This is one of the  things that might have made Bushes attempt to undo the damage the deficit reduction was doing had he chosen some other means  than the tax cuts for the rich.  Bush could have tried the infrastructure spending that Reich would go on to urge years later to Obama.

It is just amazing how people  can look at the same facts and some can draw the absolutely wrong lessons from them.  Read the article about the opposite prescriptions offered by Robert Reich and Robert Rubin.

In talking about Obama’s self proclaimed pragmatism in economics, The New York Times article had the following to say:

Invoking pragmatism doesn’t help the average voter much; ideology, though it often gets a bad name, matters, because it offers insight into how a candidate might actually behave as president. I have spent much of this year trying to get a handle on what is sometimes called Obamanomics and have come away thinking that Obama does have an economic ideology. It’s just not a completely familiar one. Depending on how you look at it, he is both more left-wing and more right-wing than many people realize.

It is the ideology that predisposes one to take certain lessons from the facts when deciding what lessons the facts teach.  The prescience of the article was the warning that Obama was more right-wing than many people realized.

Think Progress has the article Decades Ago, Robert Kennedy Explained Something That Trump Still Doesn’t Know About The Economy.

Weeks before he was killed, he spoke on this subject at the University of Kansas, March 18, 1968 — in what President Obama called “one of the most beautiful of his speeches.”

 
You could include Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama among the people who don’t know this. I wonder if either Obama has forgotten what was in this speech, or if he didn’t understand the meaning of it when he heard the words. In Elizabeth Warren’s presentation about income inequality after the plenary session of the Massachusetts Democratic State Convention she used an understanding of these facts to motivate the rest of the talk.

I have been waiting for this to be posted to YouTube so I can share with you what I saw at the convention.

Senator Elizabeth Warren spoke at the Massachusetts Democratic Party State Convention in Lowell, MA on June 4, 2016.

Don’t just stay for the sound bites, as great as they are The whole thing is filled with important stuff (yes, even the substance is far from boring.)

Remember, that she also gave a 1 hour presentation on income inequality in a breakout session after the formal convention meeting. It was held in half a gymnasium to overflow crowd to the extent that the presentation had to be opened up to the other half of the gymnasium.

I suspect that this presentation will not be posted on YouTube for a while. This is a presentation that she is planning to give around the country. She didn’t say where or when she would be doing this. I suspect it will either form the basis of her Presidential campaign or at the very least in an effort to influence the outcome of the Convention in Philadelphia in July. Elizabeth Warren could be the consensus candidate if the convention should deadlock over the choice between Clinton and Sanders.

Entertainment Weekly has the article John Oliver surprises thousands with $14 million debt relief.

John Oliver was feeling generous on Sunday’s episode of Last Week Tonight — but first he wanted to paint a clear picture of the debt industry.

John Oliver uncovers and fixes a debt problem that is so obscene that every politician should be fighting over who will be first to propose a solution.

I would remark on how easy it would be for the government to buy back this debt for pennies on the dollar and forgive it, but that isn’t even necessary.

The debt that John Oliver bought and forgave isn’t even legally collectible. So the laws have already forgiven it, but debt collectors still harass people to collect it. Why? Because who is going to stop them?

Furthermore, John Oliver had to forgive the debt in a specific way so that the debtor wouldn’t become liable to the IRS for taxes on the amount of the debt forgiven. The IRS imputes this as income so that you owe income taxes when you are released from a debt by someone “paying” it off for you.

Now do you believe Bernie Sanders when he says the system is rigged against you?

Salon has an excellent article How the rich stole our money — and made us think they were doing us a favor.

Big business and wealthy interests pushed through Wall Street deregulation during the Reagan and Clinton eras, which not only boosted the stock market but also allowed large banks to make unprecedented money off of home loans. The end result was that wealthy landlords and asset owners got much richer while rents increased and wages declined, but most Americans didn’t feel the pinch because rising home values made them feel rich on paper until the Great Recession.

As I remember it, I think it must have been some time in the 1980s when I realized that depending on a salary was never going to lead me to financial independence.  That was when I realized that taking advantage of the 401K/IRA system would allow me to become an asset owner.  I never wanted to be a landlord.  That would require too much interaction with real people on a timely basis.  I decided to finally learn how to become a stock owner in a way that was compatible with my tendency to procrastinate.  I did manage to become financially independent enough to retire shortly after I reached the age of 62.

Getting to this stage of independence did force me to learn how to play the oligarchs’ game even though I didn’t like the way that game was set up.  That is a moral conundrum many of us have been forced into.  We may not like what this system does to people, but as a matter of survival, we have to learn how to use it.  At least that is my excuse, and I am sticking to it.

My excuse could be the one that Elizabeth Warren could use to justify her financial success in the world.  It would be great if she had the courage to openly discuss this.